like chasing smoke
by ncfan
Summary: -Uryuu, Ryuuken- They've never gone together and, most likely, they never will.


**Characters**: Uryuu, Ryuuken**  
Summary**: They've never gone together and, most likely, they never will.**  
Pairings**: None**  
Warnings/Spoilers**: None**  
Timeline**: during Time Skip**  
Author's Note**: I honestly don't know what year _Bleach_ is supposed to start in, so I'm just going with somewhere around 2005.**  
Disclaimer**: I don't own Bleach.

* * *

He doesn't find out where his mother's grave even is until he's in his late teens, and Ryuuken doesn't exactly tell Uryuu how to get there (just leaves as fast as he can, which Uryuu can't help but find insulting; the last time he checked, he's not infected with the plague) so it takes a fair amount of map searching on a computer at the public library to figure out where the place he's describing is. It's the inner city, the poorer, less inhabited places, the places one would have expected to have been razed and replaced with apartment buildings long ago, but hasn't been. Uryuu supposes he should be grateful for that.

A sharp, icy wind blasts through the street again and, wincing, Uryuu holds his coat closer against him and resists the temptation to reach out and touch the low hanging tree branches glazed with ice (One thing he wonders about, almost constantly, is how trees can survive like that when people can't). Mercifully, the wind dies down and doesn't bother him again.

The weather has been miserable so far this winter—there's a thin skim of snow on the ground, certainly heralding more in the near future. Everyone who lives in the houses around where he's walking is either at work or huddled inside, doing their best to ward off the omnipresent cold. Uryuu doesn't mind, is almost glad as he flinches at chapped cheeks; he's never been much of one for socializing with strangers, and especially not in a situation like this.

Surrounded by a thin fence of trees, the cemetery has a distinct, unmistakable air of neglect about it, even though none of the headstones are more than sixty years old. This place is home to the dead from the surrounding area and yet it doesn't seem to be often visited, if the absence of flowers living or wilted and other signs and tokens is anything to go on. There's no sign that departed loved ones are still sought after by the living. It all feels just a little eerie, to be honest, as though the ground should not be touched.

Uryuu remembers what Ryuuken told him, even more tonelessly than usual, about his mother wanting to be buried with her family here, despite the fact that her childhood neighborhood is teetering on the edge of destitution (And there's no way of knowing if the houses have always looked so unkempt or if they've just decayed since the days of his mother's childhood). That would mean that there are other relatives here, other blood kin among the headstones and the coffins, but for once Uryuu, who is usually so much more eager for any information he can garner about either side of his family, isn't concerned with that. How would he recognize the names anyway, when he doesn't even have that information? There's only one he seeks today.

Finally, the energy draining slowly out of him at the sight of it, Uryuu finds what he was looking for.

The silence is complete, and Uryuu finds his eyes obsessively avoiding his mother's name and instead lighting on the dates of birth and death. _July 8, 1960—December 27, 1990_. It seems such a short time to be alive, even by the standards of their people (For the most part, Quincy aren't known for their long life spans; they're more likely to be known for being strange people prone to bizarre accidents and getting ripped to shreds mysteriously, at least to the eye of the general population).

He's not sure how he should be behaving. Some might cry or devolve to a gibbering wreck in front of their mother's grave, but Uryuu, who has never been given the chance to grieve properly for anyone in his life and wouldn't know how to grieve "properly" (if there even is such a thing) if he was given the chance, just feels silent and empty as a desiccated corn husk. What he feels is an inability to speak and his mind recalling what to him seems the oddest, most inappropriate thing.

Quincy don't cremate their dead. That, Uryuu assumes, has a great deal to do with where his race arose from; early Quincy were primarily northern European Christians who considered the destruction of the body after death to be an act of sacrilege. Even though the religion once adhered to has long since been abandoned, the practice of burial over cremation has still been maintained.

Ryuuken, Uryuu decides bitterly, will probably want to be cremated, following his own tradition of making breaks with the past and denying _all_ aspects of it, utterly.

She was buried, not cremated. There's more than ashes beneath his feet in a pine coffin. But how much? Is there rotting flesh, bits of hair and sinew still clinging to bone? Or only bones, or even that much? There may be naught but dust now, the musty smell of death still clinging with tight fingers to the wood.

Others, Uryuu supposes, might start to speak right about now. They might speak until they run out of words and their throats, hoarse and dry, fail them and fall to silence. They might behave as though their words can actually be heard.

For himself, Uryuu can only think of one thing to say, and his tongue holds the bitter words and tastes them long before he can find it in himself to give them to the air.

"I should have come sooner."

No more words are there to be shed and discarded uselessly. Uryuu has not been able to delude himself into finding babbling to impersonal stone to be a comfort in a very long time (_And it was never much of a comfort to start with, even if he would talk until his throat ached just so it wouldn't have to be silent_). Words shouldn't be wasted on empty air; words shouldn't be wasted on stone or bone or dust. Words mean nothing, not when there is no one to hear them.

So he leaves. Uryuu can be empty and pensive and lonely anywhere. He can miss his mother, and try to dredge up memories of her and fail anywhere. The cemetery is cold and eerie and, above all else, he feels as though the ground should not be set foot on and he shouldn't be there.

There's nothing more to say here, nothing more to do here, nothing more to keep him here.

-0-

_As he leaves, as he reaches the fence of gnarled, naked trees, Uryuu turns round when he hears feet crunching on the snow. There is another in the cemetery now—maybe it's not as forgotten and abandoned as he first thought it to be, for here stands another searching out the stony mounds to tell a dead man's name._

_Then, the lone traveler stops, in front of the same grave that Uryuu founds himself staring at a few minutes earlier, and he realizes with a jolt that there's only one person this can be._

_He and Ryuuken have never been here together and it's likely to stay that way for the foreseeable future. It's simply not done, and both are far better off and far better disposed apart than they are together._

_Uryuu knows he should be leaving—he has no desire to be caught out here by his father, or to speak the conversation that would surely follow being caught. However, despite knowing that to be gone would be better for him, he finds himself standing stock-still, watching him and wondering what he'll do._

_Ryuuken's always been one for compulsively denying the past up to the point that the past will no longer_ allow_ him to ignore it. He doesn't discriminate in what or who he ignores; if they're part of the past and a painful or problematic part, he'll do his very best to keep them out of sight and out of mind. What is he doing here?_

_There is silence, utter silence—Ryuuken seems to sense as much as Uryuu does the complete and utter futility of trying to speak to bones. Not a single word passes the cold air or finds the tombstone._

_Then, Ryuuken bends down and presses a single hand against the cold rough stone. It's too far away for Uryuu to see his father's expression and he doesn't think he can guess what sort of expression he must be wearing; he's never seen the man in a position like this before. It's what he's come to recognize to be an intensely private moment, but Uryuu has the morbid curiosity of a vulture and he can't look away, or leave._

_When Ryuuken gets up and leaves, there are still no words to be said. Uryuu waits until he's out of sight, and then starts for home out of the opposite direction from which his father came. No words are spoken._

_Trying to talk to the dead, if they aren't standing in front and looking at you, is about as productive as chasing smoke. That much they can agree on._


End file.
